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The University will receive $20 million over the next five years to start a new Energy Frontier Research Center staffed by a team of 15 researchers, including four University professors.
The center will be one of 46 institutions to ...
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It is a shame that the graduate school has decided to cut back on the number of students admitted, just as exciting initiatives such as this are being launched.
From the Science in Society blog (http://ssmag.wordpress.com)
Since President Obama has pledged to “restore science to its rightful place,” researchers have been hopeful that the new economic stimulus package will include a boost to science. Fortunately, the bill includes funds for basic research: $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $40 billion for the Department of Energy, and more than $1 billion each for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is significantly down from the more generous House package, though: the NSF funding, for instance, has been cut from $3 billion to $1 billion.
It’s important to note that this is a package of more than $800 billion. The cost of funding science is pretty minor in comparison. But research — even and especially basic research — drives future productivity. Cosmic Variance makes the point that we’re not going to get the much vaunted revolution in green energy without some physicists (like those at Princeton’s own Plasma Physics Lab.) Basic research is an investment in the future, in the jobs that don’t exist yet.
Now there’s a fair argument that a stimulus package is the wrong place to put science spending, because of its emphasis on speed. The NSF has to allocate all its funds in three months. That’s an really tight schedule, and it almost guarantees a slapdash approach to funding. Maybe a decade-long commitment to more science funding would be better than a windfall in the stimulus package. On the other hand, politics is an imperfect endeavor, and this may be science’s best bet.
More (http://ssmag.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/stimulus-...)